The first thing you have to learn as a conductor is how to stand up straight. If you stood on a rock stage like that, people would throw pints of urine at you. Classical music is quite irksome, it emanates a sort of pomposity, but it’s one of the best things I have ever done, I’m loving it.

You don’t need to have been to a conservatoire to write pop songs, and it’s more expensive to train conductors than it is to train astronauts or fighter pilots, but there’s something about classical music. Yes, the classical-music fraternity are worse than Christians or Alcoholics Anonymous for wanting you to join, there’s a kind of desperation about it sometimes, but when you’re ready for it, it blows your mind.

-Alex James

I read it here, about the “Make Me a Maestro” reality show that I won’t get to see because it’s in Britain.

I hope those who auditioned didn’t use any vibrato in their batons: Norrington was a judge. Oh. Wait. That’s what the players do, eh?

Side Note: I see David Soul will be a contestant. You know? The guy on Starsky & Hutch. The singer of “Don’t Give Up On Us Baby” (and yet he’s been married four times. Hmm. Wonder who gave up.). I don’t know the other names. I wonder … should I? (Goldie, Katie Derham, Clive Anderson, Sue Perkins, Alex James, Jane Asher, Peter Snow, Bradley Walsh)

I’m a little amused at the implication that rock music has no “pomposity”? Some (by no means all) seems nothing BUT empty pomposity. Certainly, that was true of a lot of the music that was so hot back in my youth (early 70s).